A conceptualization of a nuclear or radiological emergency

•Communicating nuclear and radiological safety concepts to the general public.•Multi-lingual semantic indexing of nuclear or radiological emergency content.•Linking informal language to formal nuclear or radiological emergency terms.•Extracting nuclear or radiological emergency terminologies from textual glossaries.•The IAEA Safety Glossary is the core of a cross-linked system of formal terminologies.

A novel implementation is presented for NREO, a subject-specific ontology of the Nuclear or Radiological Emergency domain. The ontology design is driven by the requirements of ontology-based, multi-lingual language processing and retrieval use cases, but care is taken to architect the foundations in a way that can be extended to support other use cases in the domain. More specifically, NREO codifies and cross-references existing terminology glossaries and stakeholder lists into machine-processable terminological resources. At the interest of semantic interoperability, the proposed architecture is based on the Simple Knowledge Organization Scheme catalyzing the extensive cross-linking to different ontologies both within the nuclear technology domain and in related domains and disciplines. This and all other core design decisions are presented and discussed under the prism of their adequacy for our use cases and requirements. Both the ontology and terminological data have been made publicly available.